As Wallace McClure points out Microsoft expands efforts to transistion from VB6 to .NET, while doing little more than quoting from this article: Microsoft walks VB tight rope I get the impression that he also is against it. I want to state my opinion up front. VisualBasic.NET is the future, but until they plug the few remaining holes that remain between it and VB6 I believe they should extend their support of VB6. As they mention in both articles above, the next version of Visual Studio.NET (2005?) should fill in one of those holes with the ability to "Edit and Continue" while in debug mode. But, there's still a few more gaping holes that have been present since the first introduction of .NET that needs some filling. As Joel Spolsky so elegantly put it: Please Sir May I Have a Linker?
This is a feature that every development language has, but yet .NET is missing. To date, the only response that I've ever heard from Microsoft was what Jason Zander's reply in his blog: Comments on "Please Sire May I Have a Linker?" Which I must say really does not give any real valid excuses, etc. This decision should be left up to the software developers. That's why I tend to agree with Mark Lucovsky: Shipping Software that Microsoft is still trying to ship software in very out dated methods. I wonder if this why he's no longer with them? And now the final really big hole that I'm aware of with .NET that must be filled before real Windows Software developers can truly produce and distribute applications as effectively as they were able to with VB6: The .NET framework can not run on Windows 95, yet it can on WindowsCE? Go figure. Software developers who are trying to actually distribute and maybe even sell their software can not put these kind of restrictions on their wishful customers. Which leads me to my final point: VB6 is really dead now, but these hole's still need to be addressed and filled. I'm totally crazy about the idea of the next Visual Studio targeting more than just the Developer and trying to create a complete team environment, but what scares me, is the deployment of the framework today and tomorrow. I've heard the next Framework is approximately 10 meg above the current 25 meg. That's crazy. Just crazy.